Presently used guns generally depend on high energy, high density exothermic, chemical propellants to provide high pressure gasses in a chamber and barrel to accelerate a projectile in the chamber through the barrel. Such guns are efficient reliable devices for projectile devices below about 1.5 kilometers per second. However, sound speed limitations of two phase mixtures incorporated in burning propellant grains and gasseous combustion products cause a rapid decline in gun efficiencies for higher projectile velocities. In the hypervelocity range, above 1.5 kilometers per second, it is desirable to use other energy sources to heat conveniently packaged low atomic weight propellants inside of a gun. It appears to be quite attractive to use an electrical source located outside of the gun to supply energy to heat the low atomic weight propellants inside of the gun.
It is, accordingly, an object of the present invention to provide a new and improved apparatus for enabling a gun to accelerate projectiles efficiently to the hypervelocity range.
Another object of the invention is to provide a new and improved hypervelocity gun that employs electrical energy generated outside of the gun to heat low atomic weight propellants located inside of the gun.